


How to Make a Bad Day Worse

by benjaminrussell



Category: Critical Role
Genre: Gen, discussion of canon character death, spoilers for ep26, the other three members of the mighty nein find out what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 06:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15407451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benjaminrussell/pseuds/benjaminrussell
Summary: Jester, Fjord and Yasha are rescued from the Iron Shepherds but it’s not the happy celebration that Jester hoped for.





	How to Make a Bad Day Worse

When their rescue comes, it’s in the form of a tall Firbolg woman who tells them in her soft voice to hurry; that their friends need their help fighting the people who’d kidnapped them. Jester, Fjord and Yasha are all bruised and battered but that of course isn’t going to stop them from helping the rest of the Mighty Nein, especially not when it also involves getting revenge on their captors. They thank her and rush down the corridor in the direction she indicated, pausing only to liberate some weapons for Yasha and Jester, and soon come across Beau, Nott, Caleb and a dwarven woman they don’t recognise fighting several of the Iron Shepherds including the leader, Lorenzo. They leap into the fray, yelling greetings to their friends but leaving the questions like ‘what happened?’ and ‘how did you find us?’ and ‘where’s Molly?’ for later, and their arrival soon turns the tide of the fight in their favour.

Jester knocks one of their captors unconscious with a particularly viscous swing of her spiritual weapon, and almost simultaneously out of the corner of her eye she sees another of them go down under the combined onslaught of Fjord and Nott. The one that Yasha is fighting is looking pretty bloodied and like they won’t last much longer, leaving Lorenzo to be slowly backed into a corner by Beau and Caleb. Now that Jester has a moment to catch her breath and take stock of her surroundings, she sees that both of them are looking uncharacteristically angry. Beau often looks annoyed or grumpy, but this is something else entirely, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Caleb looking like that. It’s scary.

Beau takes a swing at Lorenzo with her quarterstaff, shouting, “This is for Molly, asshole!” and Jester feels like she’s taken a punch to the gut as she puts two and two together. She hears Fjord suck in a shocked breath to her right, and there’s an inarticulate cry of rage from Yasha as they realise that Molly has been killed, probably trying to rescue them, which just makes the horrible feeling even worse. Then Yasha sprints across the room, almost knocking Caleb over as she passes in her race to land a giant sweeping blow with her borrowed sword, nearly cutting Lorenzo clean in half.

There’s a moment of quiet after Lorenzo’s body hits the floor, the only noise the group’s heavy breathing, until Yasha raises her head from glaring at the corpse to look at Beau, and utters one word that should be a question but instead just sounds like a demand.

“How.” Beau scowls and kicks Lorenzo’s corpse, but it’s Caleb who answers, in a sad, heartbroken voice, “We tracked them down after you three were taken, and set an ambush. But there were more of them than we thought, and we weren’t expecting this _Mistkerl_ to have magic. It didn’t go well.”

Jester notices the dwarf slipping off quietly as Caleb talks, but doesn’t pay her much attention, instead she’s focused on both wanting to know what happened to Molly and dreading finding out. She doesn’t have to wait long though as Nott snarls, “He killed Molly as an example!” That causes the dam to break, so she throws herself at Fjord for a tight, desperate hug, uncaring about the tears streaming down her face. She can hear the unmistakable sound of stabbing that must be Yasha taking out her grief on Lorenzo’s body, until eventually Beau murmurs something too quiet to hear and pulls Yasha away.

They need to put as much distance as possible as quickly as possible between themselves and this place, but even despite how tired she is already, and how much worse she’ll feel when they can finally rest, Jester knows Nott’s words will haunt her nightmares tonight. And many hours later when sleep finally comes, sure enough all she can hear is the grief stricken cry of her friend, accompanied by a series of images of Molly’s dead body, each more gruesome than the last and fuelled by the atrocities she saw and suffered at the hands of the Shepherds.

It’s a long time before she dreams of anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> *Mistkerl - bastard, asshole
> 
> This is me getting out my emotions about Molly’s death because what better to way to deal with it than by writing angst?


End file.
